Ochre
A man in a loose t-shirt and a bright smile entered The Sweatshop just after it opened on a Monday morning. He came with a plan, a design, and cash in advance. The design, once reviewed, was recommended to Ochre, who looked it over in silence before asking the smiling man a few questions.
“How big?”
“About that size,” said the man, putting his palm on the page so that his fingers almost reached the edges of the bright reds and blues.
“What style?”
“Traditional, I think.” he responded.
“You want to look like a prisoner?”
He laughed a little too hard. “No. Maybe more like a sailor. Something old-school.”
“Alright. Where?”
The man touched his left shoulder, high on his arm, like a flinch, an embrace. “I work in a pretty formal office. I don’t want anyone to see this when I’m in my suit.”
“Is this your first?” she asked.
He grinned, lopsided. “It is, actually.”
It was a big, complicated tattoo for someone’s first time. “That will take a few sessions. Three, probably, for lines, flats, and shades.”
“I’m fine with that.”
“It’ll cost a pretty penny, too.”
“And I’m fine with that too.”
Ochre gave the man a close look.
His expression did not change.
“Alright,” she said, and ripped a ticket off of the stack on the reception desk. They were getting low; its edge revealed even more of the jutting swordsedge of glue holding them. “I’ve got an opening next Friday, 7:00, if you want to start then. Just the lines will probably be a two or three hour session. That’s probably a three hundred dollar sit down to start you off with, too.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Her guess was law enforcement. He was cheerful, charming, bright, and he stood a bit too still. He was happy with doing things in the way she suggested, but she sensed he would not be happy about being turned down completely. He had no tattoos yet, but this first one, with its leering demon mask, was clearly supposed to give him a new edge.
After dashing off the date and time, cost and potential complications, Ochre flicked the thin slip and him in two ring-covered fingers. “Here you go.”
The man’s eyes dropped rapidly down the slip. “Great. Thank you. Can I just pay the deposit now?”
“Sure.”
He handed her a completely normal visa. She read his name, but it didn’t ring a bell, or give her any information about him. The card reader took it without issue and, with a quick snap of her wrist, she tore off the receipt and handed it and the card back to them.
“See you then,” she said, “Mr. Wright.”
He grinned cheerfully and lifted a hand above his head as he turned around. “See you then!”
--
Wright came five minutes early for his first session. Ochre had had a cancellation before, so she had already eaten her dinner, cleaned it up, and scrubbed her hands. She invited him right in.
The Sweatshop, built into what used to be a dockside warehouse, was a labyrinth of movable walls that defined individual deadends, music leaking between the corners from boomboxes or speakers that stood on rickety stools. Ochre kept her own corner of the warren quiet, and listened to the playlists of her coworkers ebb and flow around her while she worked. During the day, they blended into a nonsense of noise that became nothing, echoes under the buzz of her gun; she wasn’t usually a chatty artist. This late at night, the only other guy working was indicated by an orange glow nearly across the warehouse, and his speaker was playing a King Crimson album, low and repeating, halfway through Starless as she led her client through the crooks of the maze, repeating one relentless note over and over.
It was summer, and hot, and the old warehouse wasn’t ventilated well. When Ochre finally reached her quiet backroom of the shop she turned on the fan she had welded to the corner of the wall and its roar almost covered the music. The client turned in a slow circle, seemingly admiring the collection of small art pieces, mostly gathered at street markers, that she had bolted to the walls.
“You have a great set up in here.”
“Thanks.”
“The chair, I assume?”
She had one large, leather piece meant for her clients, a vintage couch she had further modified with the help of her then-girlfriend, the welder who had taught her half of the skills she had used to make her studio. “Yeah. Since you’re doing shoulder, maybe chest-down. Get your shirt off first.”
Wright nodded and, to her relief, didn’t say some dumb shit as he turned around to peel his t-shirt off his back. (It was official merchandise of a children’s show.) Ochre focused on getting her own setup ready. Like many other artists she had gotten ahold of a dentist’s setup and modified it for her own tools. When she grabbed the metal tray and adjusted its arm, her bottles of ink and tightly wrapped rows od needles jostled and jangled.
Wright laid his shirt down on the back of the chair. “Is it weird for you to work this late?” he asked.
“No, not me.”
“The place is pretty empty.”
“Most people want their Friday night off.”
“True.”
Ochre gave him a close look as he scanned the traded art near her ceiling, some of which fluttered rapidly in the wind from the fan. His questions had raised a little yellow flag in her head, but his tone was chatty and oblivious, not creepy.
Still. She removed her phone from her pocket and put it on the tray too. “It was your first time getting a tattoo, right?”
Wright turned around to her. “Yeah. Hadn’t really thought about it before the idea to get this one really got into my head.”
“Alright.” It was a very specific design. “Did you see the design I sent you?”
“Yes. I love it. You really made my dumb drawing look great. I don’t know how you…”
“Thanks.”
“It’s perfect. Just about perfect. One thing?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know if it makes sense, but… the demon mask. The oni mask.”
“Yeah, oni was the vibe I thought you were going for.”
“Totally. Yes. But, I don’t know if you can do this, but… do you think it could look less threatening, and more… pretending its threatening?”
Ochre thought about it. “Like it’s really a mask.”
“Yeah. Yes. Literal and metaphorical.”
“What’s it covering up?”
Wright paused for several seconds. He hadn’t expected the question.
“Sadness.”
“Yeah,” said Ochre. She wouldn’t have to change the expression more than a little. “Yeah, I can do that. Do you want to wait for another full sketch?”
“No, no. I trust you. It doesn’t need to be a big change. It will still look… like it thinks it’s furious and threatening. There’s just a sense…”
“Sure. Sure. Let me do a basic sketch for me. You can go ahead and sit down.”
Ochre grabbed a pencil from her table as Wright settled himself onto the leather. Quick lines, softening the snarl of malice, adding complication to the brow—if he wanted the suggestion that the menace was a farce to be subtle, then the change would be subtle. She tapped the tip of the pencil rapidly to the sketch as, barely audible under the fan, Starless increased in tempo and pitch.
“Do you do… like, do you transfer it onto the skin first?”
“Oh. No, I usually don’t.”
“It's all in your head.”
“Sure is,” she responded. Her hackles were raised; he didn’t sound flirty, she didn’t think, but he sounded so close to flirty it was putting her on edge anyway. But…
Maybe because they had been talking about it, she wondered if it was a farce.
It was his first time getting art. He might just be more nervous than he let on. “I will sketch the major outlines out on you first after we get you clean. Thank you for coming in mostly clean already.”
He laughed. “Some people don’t?”
“They sure don’t.”
“You must have seen some crazy things,” said Wright as she tore open an alcohol wipe.
“Sure have. I’m going to clean you up now.”
Wright didn’t say anything as she cleaned the surface of his shoulder. The sanitizing liquid was cold on her fingers; he shuddered when the fan turned its face to him. “When that dries up, we’ll get started.”
“I’ll brace myself.”
“You’ll know when the needles come out,” she assured him. In the meanwhile, she got her marker ready to draw out the major outlines of the design; that and her drawing were all she would need. “Tonight we’re doing the outlines of everything, which will mostly be black and white. White won’t show up on your skin as well, but it should look good on that chessboard design.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Alright.” Without any more preamble, she touched the tip to his skin and began to make slow, steady lines in pale blue.
It was a very involved design, involved and opaque. On top, an oni mask was turned slightly to the side, like a door just cracked open, revealing a bare inch of what was beneath it. It was scowling red, blushing magenta, dark blue; its snarling yellow teeth and black eyes were an animal threat display. The human hand, elegantly cut off, which touched one side of it, as if coyly removing it, suggested exactly what was being hidden.
Behind and underneath it, a black and white pattern of a chessboard slowly expanded. The mask revealed a game which wasn’t a game; on the near edge, a single black night faced the otherwise empty expanse, as if it woke up to find the war was suddenly, finally over.
Between the squares of the chessboard, and holding one sharp corner, was a golden bowl. On the side of the bowl were two golden chains, which rose on both sides of the whole image; one ended wrapped in the smallest finger of the hand that held the mask, and the other rose to the side of the mask, where it was tangled in the broken cord that would have bound it to the back of someone’s head; looped, therefore, into both the man and the mask. On the bowl was inscribed one date and nothing else: 12-28-XXXX. Not a recent date.
It all seemed heavy-handed, and yet, Ochre had not yet puzzled out what the story behind it was. But something with this complexity, this specificity, and on completely virgin skin suggested a memorial. The date was pretty far in the past to be a death date, but some deaths lingered.
Her sketch, once finished, covered his shoulder and half his upper arm. She handed him a salon mirror with a tortoiseshell frame. “Is that too big?”
He turned the silver surface one way, then the other. “No. It’s perfect.”
“Alright. Then the needle part is coming.” She took the mirror back and, without any other warning, started up her gun.
Wright jumped. “Oh, that’s loud.”
“It tends to startle people the first time.”
Wright responded with a nervous exhale. She let him have a few moments, then touched his skin with the tips of her gloved fingers. “I’m going to get started.”
“Ready, your honor.”
He still flinched the first moment he felt the needle, but she had started with a thick line for a reason. He breathed out and began to slowly relax.
The growl of the motor and hum of the fan together drowned out all other sound and the room was filled with buzzing like a hive. Ochre adjusted her standing lamp with one hand as she began to make slow, sweeping lines with the other; the mask first, and then the hand that held it.
She liked, when possible, to work in silence. The hum of automatic noise slipped her mind into focus like a conveyer belt. The man under her hands slowly relaxed from stiffness as he grew used to the persistent pain. She drew up the barrel of her gun like a paintbrush and it left art in its wake.
It had already been late in the evening when Wright arrived and the evening soon blended into night. There were no windows in her cramped studio, but Ochre always felt that she knew when the light faded. Maybe she heard the shrill cries of cricket just under the noise. Maybe the pressure of the heat relaxed on her arms.
The expression on the mask was coming out right. She was more relaxed when Wright asked, “How long have you been doing this?”
“About eight years, professionally,” she replied. “I’ve been doing this in some form most of my life.”
“How’d you learn?”
“Initially through a friend that knew how.” Though, in the end, he had proven to not be much of a friend. “I was pretty young, so I practiced drawing on fruit rinds and things like that until I was confident.”
“Is that a thing? Tattooing oranges?”
“If you’re young and don’t have anything better, sure.”
“Then you got into it professionally?”
“As a side gig, while I was doing other work, and not always at the best places. I finally settled down in this place with art as my main gig eight years back.”
“Good for you,” he said. His eyes were closed, his face braced on the opposite arm. “I was in art school for a while, but I changed my career.”
“To what?”
“Law.”
“Ouch.”
It was when Wright started laughing when Ochre realized how judgmental her comment had come out. “That’s usually a switch people make for purely pragmatic reasons. It’s a hard choice for an art major to make.”
“It wasn’t for me. I mean, I had other reasons. I decided that I did truly want to become a defense lawyer… no, I realized that I had to become one.”
“An actual passion for justice.”
“Yes.”
“Yeah. I respect that.”
“It’s hard to keep up,” the man admitted, opening his eyes just enough to look at the distant concrete floor. “Like you said, most people did make a pragmatic choice to become a lawyer. Monetary. Selfish. Most of them want to win and that’s all. I’ve seen so many do whatever it takes to win and give up whatever someone will pay for. But that does mean that they’re pretty easy to beat.”
“Is that so?”
“If your opponent has no principles,” Wright continued, “eventually, that drags them down. They lie and tangle themselves in lies. The judge, the detective, the witnesses turn against them. You can—I was in the performing arts,” he interrupted himself, “before the switch. If your opponent is corrupt enough you can honestly act your way out of it.”
“Huh.”
“They’ll slip up eventually. You just have to keep up the performance.”
Then he fell silent for a minute. To Ochre, he did sound like some of the theatre people she knew; stage people, live theatre, the kinds that couldn’t give up a real backstage, a real space, and real time for their art. It did take some ego, yes, but it also took dogged persistence, slavish toil for one day in the sun.
Why didn’t more actors become lawyers, now that she thought about it? “I can see how one might lead to another, when you put it that way.”
Wright laughed. “If more of my opponents actually knew how to act, I’d be screwed.”
Ochre chuckled. She had the major outlines done on the mask and the hand; she would block out the rest of the image before filling in the shapes. She regarded the chessboard, the golden bowl that cupped it, upheld with chains…
“You know,” she said, lowering the pen to begin drawing the swooping curves that would make the bowl. “I don’t usually ask, to be honest. But what’s the story behind the ink?”
Wright did not respond for a few seconds. Then he said, “You’re seeing the connections?”
“It’s the scales of justice, right?”
“Right.”
“Or just one.”
“One half,” he agreed. “Like I said, a lot of them are corrupt… Prosecutors. I’m a defense attorney.”
“Is that how it is? You pick a side?”
“The roles are different enough that most people do. It takes a real genius to do both well. So I chose defense, and there’s always a prosecutor on the other side. If they’re corrupt, I outweigh them easily. But if I’m face to face with someone who wants to find the truth, protect the innocent, and punish the guilty as much as I do… then it’s a balance. A perfect balance. If you’re really both there for justice, it’s like… it’s like sweeping a sickle through grain.”
Ochre did not have good experiences with or opinions of the justice system. “Not sure the grim reaper is the image you want.”
Wright winced. “Ouch. You’re right, though. I always try to keep my focus on the innocent. My client is innocent. I believe that. I do whatever it takes to prove it.”
“What about when that’s not true?”
“When my client is actually guilty?”
“Yeah.”
Wright sighed. “It happens sometimes. If that’s the truth, the honest truth, I have to give it up to the other guy, on the other side of the scale, and trust in him.”
“Sure.” She did not agree at all. When the goal was punishment, there was no justice, and if justice happened anyway, it was with the resilience of a dandelion that grew around the cracks of the concrete tyranny that stifled it. “Is this tattoo… about a specific prosecutor?”
Wright closed his eyes again. “Yeah.”
“Someone you work closely with?”
“I did.”
“You lost him.”
Wright turned his head slightly to look at her, warily. “That’s… true. Yes. He died. A few months ago. I uh… I heard that some tattoo artists won’t do memorials.”
“Some won’t,” she agreed, carefully outlining the edge of the chessboard that dipped into the rim of the scale. “It depends on your personal feelings. Some don’t do it at all, but for me, it’s situational. I try to consider the person in front of me. If they’re still in shock I refuse, or give them a really long waiting time to think it over. But if someone comes in with clear eyes, like you did, I don’t have a problem with it. You’ve obviously thought about this pretty hard already.”
“I have.”
“If you do regret it, though, there’s no going back. There’s no cover-up for something like this.”
Wright laughed hard enough that Ochre removed the pen for a moment. “Sorry. Sorry.”
“It’s alright. I’ll try not to make you laugh.”
“There’s no cover-up for this. Ha ha. No, I realize that. There’s no… way to cover it up for me, either. In the end, I wanted to be able to just see it.”
A melancholy settled on him like a bird on his back. Ochre started inking again.
“We were friends,” Wright said. “As boys. His father was a lawyer. He just idolized him. He wanted to become a lawyer just like him. I did meet his dad a few times; I didn’t have one, and he seemed like… just exactly what a dad should be.”
Ochre hummed. She didn’t want to interrupt now. She knew when a long story had begun; its slowly growing tides was another mantra that drew her mind to her gun and her gun on.
“He was the person who made me want to be a lawyer, too. My friend—well, both of them, really. Neither of us would have been on this path without Mr. Edgeworth. I had been something of an outcast before I became friends with him; I sort of think that even then, everyone knew when they looked at me. But Miles would defend me. You know, he was a kid trying to be his dad; if someone got into trouble, he wouldn’t try to sit on the sidelines and stay out of trouble himself. He rushed right in and got involved. I was a little in awe of him from the start. And he was my best friend. We did everything together.
“For a little while.”
Ochre kept drawing, straight lines and winding. The chains tying the scale to the hand and the mask would have to be next, as winding and complex as they were. “What happened?”
Wright sighed, slowly, melting down as his lungs folded under him. “Miles’ dad died when we were in the fourth grade,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“He was… well. It was ugly. Miles was there with him when he died. And, when the dust settled…
“I still don’t know exactly what happened, why he had to be adopted out rather than taken in by any other family. I’m sure he had some. I think they were ashamed, since Mr. Edgeworth died in dubious circumstances. But Miles was taken in by someone… someone with bad intentions.
“I didn’t see him again until we were both grown up. Didn’t even learn his father had died until I asked why he hadn’t been at school. I tried to find him, to call him, and I couldn’t. When I met him again, fifteen years later, he was… just… completely fucked up.”
Ochre worked in silence for a while. Link after link after link made a chain. She worked first on the one that would loop around the finger of a human hand.
“That bastard just completely fucked him up,” Wright repeated. It sounded like there had been a fire here, but Ochre was only hearing the coals now. “By the time I saw him again, he was barely recognizable. And I know it was him. I met him. I saw how Miles acted around him. I saw how scared he was of the man who raised him after his father died. By the time I met him again, it was just too late for him.
“Miles took his own life,” he said, looking at the ground, calm. “A few months ago. I wanted… I thought he could overcome it. The mess. Everything that had been done to him. I thought he was getting better. But maybe he was just too messed up. Maybe there was no coming back from what had been done to him. I don’t know if it was one moment of weakness, or if he was never going to be able to climb out of that pit.”
Link to link. Ochre listened.
“I know there was a way forward for him,” Wright contradicted himself, soft, strained. “I’m scared that I pushed him too hard. Too fast. I thought he could get better. I thought he could face it and overcome it. I believed in him.
“It’s crazy. It feels like you’re children together one day. And the next…”
Ochre set one hand on his shoulder blade to brace him as she continued linking the chain up his arm. He tensed, then fell silent for a while.
The distance grew dimmer, cooler. Her coworker had finished up work for the evening and turned off his lamp. That meant it would only be her and her client in the building for the rest of the session.
She might not agree with his philosophy or career, but if there was anything Ochre understood, it was putting your back into trying to help a friend crawl out of a tarpit and losing your grip. She had watched people fall back in slowly and had known there was nothing she could do to wrench them out if they were going to be nothing but dead weight.
She looked at his untouched skin. “You two were the same age?”
“Yeah.”
“How old?”
“Twenty-five.”
God.
She didn’t tell him what he would find out with time; there was no way, no way in the world that it had been the end of the line for that poor boy. Twenty-five. Worlds could be built from twenty-five to thirty; from then until her age, empires could rise and fall. When she had been twenty-five herself, she had thought about it differently, took a suicide with grit teeth and grace; now, the thought that anyone could think twenty-five was as far as they could go was intolerable. To have that little grace, that little forgiveness for someone so young, even when that person was yourself.
She took her time on the complex work of linking the golden chain around the little finger. It was a challenge; she wanted it to look real, like the tension and the weight was preserved on the skin in front of her, like the weight of the scale was pressing on the bone. The physical facts, ink on skin, were completely real, whatever the symbol meant to one person or another.
Wright laid still through the detailing. His eyes were distant.
After some time, he said, “What is crazy is that he wasn’t a different person. He was acting completely different. Like I said, I was an actor, too, for a while. He acted completely different. But it was always to me… as plain as if he was acting naked… that this was exactly how the person he was would act if he had gone through what he had. You know? He was acting a villain, but I knew who it was that had the costume on.
“Maybe I’m giving him too much grace. I saw him do some messed-up things. Maybe he wasn't just acting the villain. But I knew the actor in there, and someone who was a villain wouldn’t have played the role the same. If his motivation had been greed, power, he wouldn't have done it the same. He still played an absolute bastard like someone whose goal was just to be safe.”
Ochre breathed out slowly. “It’s just how I think,” she prefaced, “but I think even the worst villains in our lives really just have the same motivations we do. Comfort. Clarity. Control. And challenge, within those bounds. When you strip it down, they want the same things. You just have to decide how much you forgive what they did to get it.”
“Yeah,” said Wright, and paused. “Yeah. I–god, I can’t believe that was him. I still just can’t believe he would do all those awful things. And it was him. It was the boy I remembered.”
The tension wasn’t comfortable, but Ochre didn’t have a problem with letting it stretch unresolved anyway, moving her pen down finally to the solitary knight on the chessboard.
“Maybe it was just too late for him, in the end. Maybe I showed up too late.”
“If the two of you were being yanked around by ugly adults while you were still children,” replied Ochre, putting down straight lines, “then that’s exactly what they want you to think.”
“You think?”
“I mean that… if this guy was hurt by the man in control of him, and that screwed him up, and you’re blaming yourself for any of it, that’s probably what the old bastard wants. And I bet he still doesn’t even feel guilty about it, either.”
Wright laughed a thin laugh. “He doesn’t, though.”
“They never do.”
“They do sometimes.”
“Do they?”
“I’ve seen it,” he said simply. “I have plenty of opportunities to, from where I stand. Some of them never feel guilty, no matter what they did. Some of them do, suddenly, understand. You can see it. They suddenly see the other side.
“I admit that’s not as common as I would like it to be.”
“I imagine not.”
“But if you cannot believe that someone really can change,” he said, “If you don’t believe, deep down in your bones, that anyone can improve, you have no business doing this job. If all you want to do is punish people it hollows you out. If you can’t hold on to the belief that they can get better, with time…
“..Still, in the meanwhile, protecting the innocent from them is what matters. And that is what I can do.”
Put that way, Ochre kind of got it. To her, there was no way around the fact that prison was just torture that the state signed off on, just like a soldier was a murderer that they approved of. But she could understand someone whose goal was to protect someone from abuse by separating the abuser from them, even if she could only understand one half of their position.
The other side just weighed it down too far, for her, and tipped the scales to injustice.
“I’m going to start filling in the details,” she said. “I’ve got all the outlines in. You’ve gotten through the hard part.”
“Really? I thought it would hurt more than this.”
“People have different levels of pain tolerance. You’re doing great. Some people like the light lines less, though; they say it tickles.”
“Oh, no.”
“You ticklish?”
“Very.”
She didn’t need him flinching. “Tell me what you liked about this guy,” she said. “When you were kids.”
So he did; the hour of light-hearted, silly stories were absolutely indistinguishable from stories about any two kids. Trouble in school and long afternoons in backyards, the banks of the river, the shore of the beach. Hallways, assignments, and studying in each other’s homes; he liked being in his friend’s house better than his own. People could become anything at all, and nine times out of ten, their stories about growing up were just the same.
Ochre saved the details on the face of the mask for last. It had been where she had started, but it was going to be the most technically difficult part of the entire piece. She had had a slow afternoon and knew she would be in her peak as she finally touched pen to that last expression. Wright told her the long, slow story of deciding to pursue law and the long nights of tearful studying as she filled in the demon’s mask.
Wright might have thought so, but the look he was asking for was not complicated. All angry men were using their fury as a mask for their misery. She already knew exactly what it looked like.
As the final hour of the session wore slowly down, Wright told her about being finally picked up as an intern by a defense office, run by an independent lawyer who he, too, had already lost.
He paused in his story. After a minute, he said, “I need to get one for Mia too.”
“What’s that?”
“A second tattoo,” he said, “the other arm. The other half. It has to go to Mia.”
“You’re going to have to step on the breaks for that one,” Ochre replied evenly. “This one is going to take two more sessions, one for flats and one for shading, and you’ll need to let your skin rest between each session. A tattoo is an open wound. You can only push your body so far.”
“Sure,” he said, “but the other arm has to go to Mia. I’m–wow. I’m a little embarrassed, now, that I didn’t think of that earlier. She should have gotten the first one. Everything was so frantic after she died; it’s really only now that I’ve had some time to think…”
“Take a little more time to think,” Ochre told him. “You’re asking for serious ink and you’re not even halfway through the first one. Think about it, sketch it out; I won’t start the second one unless a full month has gone by after this one has healed.”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
“Like I said. Memorials are situational for me. You just have that idea, I won’t do it until it’s settled and you’re certain.”
“Okay,” he said. “I understand.”
“You can’t get it just because you feel guilty now.”
“I know! But you have to admit that I’ll look lopsided with just one.”
“Maybe. But you can be off-balance for a while while you get sure of your footing.”
“Well put. You know, you’ve got a way with words.”
“I try to say as few as possible.”
“But they’re sharp. You don’t have a legal background too?”
“Not on your side of the bars,” she said, and Wright laughed, completely unashamed. “I do have a theatre background.”
“No. A designer?”
“Stagehand, set designer, prop master. This and that. Never wanted in the spotlight, though.”
“You really need the guys that set the stage. It’s invaluable.”
“I could tell you how I know that.”
“Yeah?”
“I was a big stick in the mud about doing it right. Having everything absolutely bolted down and secure.”
“Oh, man. You are the angel nobody notices.”
“If I do my job right, I am. Speaking of,” she said, and turned off her pen.
“Lines are done?” he asked hopefully.
“They’re done. Let me wipe you off before you jump up, it looks a mess right now.”
Wright stayed impatiently in the chair as Ochre wiped off all the excess ink, the beads of sweat and blood. She had been fully confident in her design but still felt a rush of pride when she wiped the tears away and saw the glowering, too-tense mask of the demon.
“Mm-hm,” she agreed with herself. “Alright. Stand up and take a look.”
Among the collection of art prints and postcards, itself cluttered in its corners with magnets and stickers, one tall mirror stood bolted to the far wall. Wright stood himself up and turned. Ochre watched his eyes light up inside the mirror with pride.
“Oh my god,” he said.
Ochre crossed her arms.
“That’s. That’s perfect.”
“Good to hear.”
“It’s perfect. It’s like you knew him.”
She didn’t. Nor had she come to know him from two hours of anecdotes and armchair psychology. What she would not tell this poor fool was that she knew the type and she knew it rather well enough.
Ochre believed that there was no mask a man could wear that was not his face. No matter what excuses he had, no matter what backstory, no matter what philosophy, what he did, he did. He had moved his own hands. Even the mourner who loved him so much could not call him a good man. If he had not been equally involved in their grim profession, had not fully accepted the need, the morality of locking people in jails in his own heart, he would not even have been able to reconcile to any real moral standard the deceased’s choice to spend his life putting people in chains. Link by link by link, their ‘scale’ of justice was held up in tenuous balance by two twisting sides, and both had an equal hand in ending the lives of far more than this one. Ochre had seen so many rot in jail, come back out a shell of themselves if they did at all, and all for the smallest of mistakes. One dead body on the other side of the scale, one man who had spent his life ruining others, did not tip them. They did not even flinch.
For all she felt that way, she saw her client’s eyes as he leaned in to touch his own arm as it appeared in the glass, the reverse image of himself. She would not remove him from his delusions. He was in love with a dead man.
“It’s pretty normal to start feeling some regret in the next few days as the reality of how you just changed your body settles in,” she said. “Wait a few days before calling me back to set the appointment for the colors. Sit with it. If you want to call me back Monday or Tuesday, we’ll set the time for the next session.”
“I will,” he said, clearly and absolutely certain he would not change his mind.
The tattoo, Ochre reflected, was a memorial; the mourning was real. Everyone had a right to their emotions. “It is going to look fantastic,” she said.
“It already does! This is amazing. Man. Maybe I should have stayed in art.”
He turned to look at her with a wide smile. She took a little too long to respond.
“It takes all sorts,” she said. Then, “I’m sure you get paid a lot better.”
“It depends,” he sighed. “Oh, man, it depends. Listen, I can’t thank you enough.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. “Let me give you my card–if you’re ever in trouble, you can give me a call.”
“Save that one until the work is done,” she said, not being able to help a smile. “You don’t know that I won’t mess it up at the last session.”
He pulled a firm white business card out of his wallet. “I insist.”
She took it, glancing at the front and then laying it down on her table. “Thanks. Can I put it on the wall? That way anyone who needs you can write your number down.”
“You know what? That sounds great.”
“I’ll hold you to it. Let me walk you back up and cash you out for the day.”
After she turned off the fan, after she switched off her lamp, the Sweatshop was dark and quiet. Emergency lights high above glowed like the glare of an interrogation room, enough for shadows, not enough for clarity; the sounds of the shore were finally uncovered from all the noise, lapping at the docks in the darkness beyond. She wove Wright back out through the maze, past dark, still studios, over the echoes of the crickets and mice that had gnawed their way inside.
“Are you the last one in?”
After three hours with him, Ochre didn’t feel threatened by the question this time. He was nosy for work and didn’t realize how prying he was being any longer, she figured; besides, he was willing to be transparent in return. “Yeah. I’m one of the building managers on paper. I have the key to lock it up.”
“I hope I didn’t put you out of your way.”
“No. I like to sleep through the day. Night’s young for me.”
“Good for you. I’m a morning person, myself.”
“You must be exhausted, then.”
“Yeah, but,” he said, and paused as they turned the final corner from the maze of studios to the now-dark front office. Ochre strode by the light without turning it on. “But I love this sort of feeling, you know?”
“When it’s dark and everyone else is gone?”
“Exactly. It reminds me of being backstage.”
Ochre smiled. “When you’re behind the play everyone else is watching.”
“Exactly. Waiting in the wings. Trying to be as quiet as you can. Just behind the curtain, where no one can see you; you know what happens next and everyone else is still trying to figure it out. Though, to be honest, it makes me think of a crime scene now, too.”
Ochre stood behind the desk. Wright stood before it. She put her hand out for his card. “Does it?”
“Yeah.” He pulled his wallet out again and removed not a card but lines of cash. Hundreds. “I know it’s a little weird. I thought of being backstage the first time I was alone in a crime scene, investigating. Everyone else has to stay away, but I get to be in the black box behind the stage. And now I feel a little excited to be at a crime scene whenever I am again. It’s almost the same feeling.”
Ochre took the cash from his hands, and he said, “That’s a little messed up, isn’t it?”
“A little. I’m sure it’s the sort of thing you get used to when you do your job long enough.” That was what Ochre said, though it wasn’t what she thought.
“Though then you remember that what you’re looking at is the worst day of someone’s life,” said Wright, looking down and into the shadows. “I always end up getting a little too involved in the case. At least, that’s what everyone says. By the time I’m done, I feel like I’m on stage again, not in the back. Now I’m in the lights, being watched, and I can’t control how it goes anymore. I can only do my best to make it work.”
“It’s even more serious for your client than it is for you.”
“I know,” he said, a little abashed. “I know. You have to… you have to keep them front and center. You have to. You have to keep focused on the fact that they may be innocent, and if they are, you have to do absolutely everything you can do to help them. You owe it to them. Everyone does, but you’re the one who ended up in the position to help them. You have to remember that, or else…”
He sighed and lifted his left hand to ruffle his hair. “Or else, I guess you end up like–oh, fuck, that hurts,” he winced, quickly lowering the arm back down.
Ochre couldn’t help a chuckle. “Sure does. Use the other arm for a few days.”
“You aren’t kidding. I’ll do that. Damn, pulling on my arm when he’s dead.”
“That would be the open wound. Baby it for a few days. You’re going into the weekend, so if you’re lucky you can stay at home and leave it uncovered; if you have to put on a suit, wear your loosest one. Call me after Monday if you want to keep going with this.”
“I will,” he said, and half-turning to leave, “Thank you, again.”
“Sure thing,” she said, and watched the door close behind him, and then stood in the dark a little while longer, alone by herself, before getting out her keys to lock the building up.
